Travel Notes

Your intrepid correspondent has taken the family on holiday, from the emerald city to Melbourne. TAFKAS very much likes Melbourne – it is a great place – and has visited many times, but this is the first time the apprentice Spartacii gladiators have travelled to “Mexico on the Yarra”.

The weather has been fantastic – cool and NOT raining, just the way TAFKAS likes it. And the people great as always, execept the very pushy school little girls at various tourist sites.

Team TAFKAS has also very much appreciated the generosity of the Victorian taxpayers in providing free transport in the city centre. Team TAFKAS have travelled much and benefited from so many Victorian taxpayer subsidies, we had to call home to check whether we were actually Tasmanian decedents.

This morning Team TAFKAS travelled to the MCG to do the tour and visit the National Sports Museum (highly recommended for Melbourne visitors if you have the time). While there, TAFKAS observed something very interesting. The MCG groundskeepers used some very large powered lamps on the grass to simulate sunlight to help the grounds grass recover and grow.

The sight of these lamps inspired TAFKAS to consider a new business venture – Solar 2.0. The idea is to buy these sun light simulation lamps and use them to power solar panels; you know when the sun does not shine. This is essentially the same strategy as Snowy 2.0, but it can be done locally and at the household level.

Solar 2.0 will use lots of capital and electricity to general the necessary light to power solar panels when there is not enough light to power them naturally. Lots of government subsidies will be expected. The ides is to use electricity to generate electricity. You know it makes sense.

Please leave your contact details in the comments section if you would like to invest. The investment will be a stapled offering of 1 unit in Solar 2.0 with 1 unit in the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

When at home in the evening, TAFKAS was reviewing the news and twitter and came upon this wonderful nugget:

How do you like that. In the tax current debate, the leader of the honourable opposition, has proposed calling the tax cut law – Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of There Money But Not For a Really Long Time.

He must be very confident of winning the next election that he is already proposing a tax increase. Chris Bowen for Treasurer anyone?

But then the coup de gras. In the afternoon, when TAFKAS was arguing with Spartacii Number 1 about getting off his mobile phone. The conversation went like this:

TAFKAS – Give me the phone.

Spartacii 1 – No. It’s mine.

TAFKAS – No it’s not. It’s mine. Everything of your’s came from me so it’s mine.

Spartacii 1 – If everything of mine is your’s then everything of your’s belongs to the government.

Not sure if this was a rhetorical debating trick aimed at irritating TAFKAS, but given Spartacii 1 goes to a high priced GPS school, chances are he has been taught everything actually does belong to the Government.

As above the Spanish thought of it first and I think they were charged with fraud. It was at a solar “farm” or an industrial plant only selling power. With the subsidy it was cheaper to run a diesel generator and get the government subsidy for the export.
It would not work at a domestic site as the wiring is such that the solar unit supplies the internal use first and export is only for the excess. As the solar units have only a low conversion efficiency of about 25% and there are losses, electricity would actual need to be imported from the grid to keep the lights on. So the scheme would be a loss maker. The way to make money is to buy a coal power plant for very little (as with the Vales Point power station in NSW which I think was sold for $1M and make cheap power to sell as the price sky rockets) If AGL could be persauded to sell Liddell for say $20M then spend about $60M on maintenance and upgrade you would get a PS of 2000MW and a life of at least 20years.